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Our history – educational innovations

Several interactive online learning resources have been created to help students learn crucial concepts in Kinesiology. Many were created with input from Kinesiology students, with support from the Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology (LT3) in Arts 303, a project-based course in which teams of students from a variety of disciplines design and prototype educational multimedia applications for on-campus courses. The interactive resources address such topics as the Moment of Force, Athletic Taping Skills, and V02 Max.

The Elliott Avedon Museum and Archive of Games, the first and only one of its kind, was created in 1971 at Waterloo as a resource for research and teaching about game use and play behaviour. The collection grew to over 5,000 objects and archival documents associated with games and now resides at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

The School of Human Anatomy, an integral part of the Kinesiology Department, is one of the few anatomy schools housed at a university that does not have a school of medicine. Established on January 17, 1978, by Orders in Council of the Government of Ontario, the school offers students the rare opportunity to study human cadavers in its anatomy laboratory.

The Leisure Studies Data Bank (LSDB) was established in 1972 to enhance student access to existing data for honours research projects, since the cost of collecting new data was burdensome and often precluded the study of issues on a larger scale. The Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies forged alliances with provincial, federal, and international agencies to gain access to their leisure databases, and eventually, the agencies asked that the LSDB become the custodian of all major leisure-related data.

Ergowatch is a software program developed by Kinesiology professors to help cut the risk of back injuries in the workplace through a computerized ergonomics exposure management system that facilitates the quantification and interpretation of loads on the body.

The Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, together with the Ontario Research Council on Leisure, founded the Recreation Review in 1970. This journal—later renamed Leisure/Loisir—is now a publication of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies and is one of two mainline leisure research journals published in Canada. Waterloo faculty members served as editors for this journal for the first 32 years of its existence.